Your former coworkers are incredibly lucky that after showing management how to turn 80h/week into 4h/week, they didn't keep the automation train going. Because the very next thing they would do is lay off 90% of the staff and make the remainder still work full time.
Automation should do what you did - give people more time off. Just about every corp uses it to minimize labour costs, though.
Management probably didn't realize that the work was getting automated.
This wasn't the type of job that laid off. Always new work, can't always automate everything.
Your former coworkers are incredibly lucky that after showing management how to turn 80h/week into 4h/week, they didn't keep the automation train going. Because the very next thing they would do is lay off 90% of the staff and make the remainder still work full time.
Automation should do what you did - give people more time off. Just about every corp uses it to minimize labour costs, though.
Management probably didn't realize that the work was getting automated.
This wasn't the type of job that laid off. Always new work, can't always automate everything.